Large manufacturers today face extreme margin pressures from low-cost producers, rising energy costs, and regulatory and environmental restrictions. The need to improve asset performance is very great. One barrier to improvement has been the absence of a performance management solution encompassing the various divisions of operations, maintenance, and finance, for example. With each division using its own performance metrics, it is difficult for optimal decisions to be made, such as balancing reliability goals against asset utilization goals.
Many people have been chasing the “holy grail” of self-diagnostics. Furthermore, there are many balanced scorecards and key performance indicator solutions being offered in today's market. Many seem to be making similar claims including that their product will make a manufacturing process run better, faster, more efficiently, and with greater returns. However, one of the greatest challenges for effectively improving plant asset performance is that the necessary information is scattered across disconnected silos of data in each department. Furthermore, it is difficult to integrate these silos due to several fundamental differences. For example, control system data is real-time data measured in terms of seconds, whereas maintenance cycle data is generally measured in terms of calendar based maintenance (e.g., days, weeks, months, quarters, semi-annual, annual), and financial cycle data is measured in terms of fiscal periods. Furthermore, different vendors of various equipment and enterprise systems tend to have their own set of codes (e.g., status codes) and are non compliant with any universal standard.
Manufacturers are drowning in a flood of real-time and non-real time data and are losing revenues at the same time. Therefore, there is a growing call for a manufacturing intelligence solution that makes use of the enormous amount of data in an intelligent manner.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional, traditional, and proposed approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems and methods with the systems and methods as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.